Yes, cause I think we'd know if all these UFOs in the sightings came from around here

3%

[ 1 ]

Yes, we just don't know how to do it yet

48%

[ 14 ]

Yes, its merely a case of we know how to do it, but the government is holding it from us

3%

[ 1 ]

Yes, we have the technology now but we just don't know we could use it for this

6%

[ 2 ]

Total Votes : 29

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da chicken

Joined: 11 Oct 2005Posts: 16

Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2005 8:30 pm Post subject:

I believe that faster-than-light travel is possible, but I do not believe it is possible to accellerate an object with mass to or beyond the speed of light.

Whether it would invovle worm holes and folding space like Dune (moving without moving), or moving an object to a coterminous dimension or universe like Star Wars hyperspace or Babylon 5 jump gates, it can probably be done. It may take a prohibitive amount of energy to do so, but it can be done.

I certainly beleive that you cant accelerate to the speed of light, not sure what would happen if you suddenly started faster than light. What i do beleive however is you can get somewhere faster than light. This could be either through maybe a wormhole or according to string theorey where there are two supersteller strings intertwisted a gap in space so you in effect, although only going at a low seed get somewhere as if taking a shorter route.(think about a cone of paper and to make it flat you have to have a gap in it. If you flew a spaceship across this gap you would jump to the other side, this however is just a theorey.)

Joined: 26 Dec 2003Posts: 476Location: Playing like there is no tomorrow.

Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 3:11 am Post subject:

In Futurama, they bring up an idea - the starship doesn't propel itself around the galaxy, it propels the galaxy around the starship. In theory, by doing both, you could travel at approx. 1.5x the speed of light (relatively), while not traversing faster than the speed of light.

mass dilation (apparent mass increase) is a result of a 'transformation' (I think a Lorentz transformation in this case) which is basically working out what you would see from two viewpoints and working out must have happened. the result is that the momentum is larger than it should be for relativistic (close to speed of light) speeds. The mass is not necessarily measured as larger, although that is one explanation. Since size of momentum is mass times speed, the 'speed' could be different to what you would expect. I hate this stuff, I'm gonna go lie down :S

Sorry for the double post, didn't see the other pages . Ok, the reason we feel g-forces is that we have a pressure on the outside of our bodies, like astronauts backs when they're being accelerated in their take off reclined chair thingys. Its kinda like an inner tension caused by a different amount of force: force on your back, no external force on your front. If a spaceship accelerated every single particle exactly the same amount, then we wouldn't feel g-force. On a side note, do you KNOW how much energy it would take to accelerate the entire universe (except for your ship ) in one direction? I'll take infinite mass any day.

Another aside: say your ship is one millionth the mass of the universe (just making a point). If you accelerate your ship to half light speed, then the average change in speed of the universe could at most be one half of one millionth of light speed (conservation of momentum). Unless you blasted out an equivalent amount of energy for the mass in front of you. We're talking about over twice the energy required to accelerate the universe to half light speed (much much more lol).

Besides, there is another formula, if two things are going in opposite directions at speeds v and s, then the relative speed observed by each will be:

(v+s)/(1+v*s)

there might be a square root in there somewhere (it was a while ago). anyway, point is you CAN'T have a speed relative to another object of the speed of light or higher. anyway, my vote was for yes, cause I'm an optimist, and cause I reckon we might be able to bend/fold space. This is good stuff, I haven't been able to have a rant about this since high school. Catch you round.

Speed is always relative. Accelerating the galaxy doesn't help the fact that you're traveling faster than the speed of light.

Another problem is that travelling faster than the speed of light would actually send you back in time according Hawkings. I forget the exact explanation. Which means that eventually, someone would come back and spill the secret to time travel. This proves that time travel is impossible because no one has come back.

you don't have to go into the past, exactly to go back in time. truly, to move faster then light is to bypass causality, and to in effect, travel in time.

this means that if you travel by normal rules, it would take 3 light years to reach a place. but with faster then light? it's like you went to that place, then traveled back in time to seconds/days/months/whatever after you started.

that's not an exact definition, but as a quick description I think it should be pretty accurate. I am not even sure if this is what you were referring to hawking talking about; but it's an effect of time travel that faster then light effects can produce.

I think the best written explanation about this effect was in Singularity Sky by charles strauss. A good book, but his short stories are even better. Recommended.

As a Physics student, I have to say no. At least according to science as it is currently understood. To travel faster than light would require an infinite ammount of energy.

However, it may be possible to take a 'short cut'. You don't actually travel faster than light, just cut the corner off using a distortion in space time (wormhole). This is of course conjecture, as such a distortion has never been observed.

EDIT: Just like what Aegis does actually...

Another dodge is that due to time dilation/length contraction, although the nearest star is 5 light years away or so, you can get there almost instantaneously from your frame of reference, provided you travel close enough to the speed of light.

Of course, you can never get there in less than five years in the rest frame of the earth, so even if you go there and back in what seems, to you, to be a couple of seconds, everyone you know will have aged ten years back on earth.

There are also certain logical problems which cause me to doubt the plausability of time travel.

In Futurama, they bring up an idea - the starship doesn't propel itself around the galaxy, it propels the galaxy around the starship. In theory, by doing both, you could travel at approx. 1.5x the speed of light (relatively), while not traversing faster than the speed of light.

Futurama is making you steal your own pants, essentially. According to the theory of relativity, there is no effective difference whether the starship is propelling itself around the galaxy or the reverse. Thus you're still trying to go at 1.5x lightspeed as far as the laws of physics are concerned ;D Essentially you are moving the world DOWN whenever you jump just as much as you are moving yourself UP Trying to say that you're not applying twice as much force when you do so using special rocket-boots because it's actually you pushing up and the rocket-boots pushing the planet down is kinda absurd ;D